Translation of the Epistle for Passion Sunday (Hebrews 9:11-15)
Brethren: Christ being come, a High Priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, neither by the blood of goats or of calves, but by His own blood, entered once into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and of oxen, and the ashes of a heifer being sprinkled, sanctify such as are defiled, to the cleansing of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the Holy Ghost, offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God? And therefore He is the Mediator of the new Testament; that by means of His death, for the redemption of those transgressions which were under the former Testament, they that are called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance, in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Translation of the Holy Gospel According to John (8:46-59)
At that time, Jesus said to the multitudes of the Jews: Which of you shall convince Me of sin? If I say the truth to you, why do you not believe Me? He that is of God, heareth the words of God. Therefore you hear them not, because you are not of God. The Jews therefore answered, and said to Him: Do not we say well, that Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil? Jesus answered: I have not a devil, but I honor My Father, and you have dishonored Me. But I seek not My own glory; there is One that seeketh and judgeth. Amen, amen, I say to you, If any man keep My word, he shall not see death for ever. The Jews therefore said: Now we know that Thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and Thou sayest: If any man keep My word, he shall not taste death for ever. Art Thou greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? and the prophets are dead. Whom dost Thou make Thyself? Jesus answered: If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing. It is My Father that glorifieth Me, of Whom you say that He is your God. And you have not known Him; but I know Him. And if I shall say that I know Him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know Him, and do keep his word. Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see My day: he saw it, and was glad. The Jews therefore said to Him: Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast Thou seen Abraham? Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made, I AM. They took up stones therefore to cast at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the temple.
The Saving Words of the Gospel.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen
Transcription of Sermon
Lent is broken up into several parts. We have a pre-Lent period, which is called Septuagesima. It’s supposed to get us ready for the Great Fast, for Lent, and then we have the first four weeks of Lent in which we centre our attention on the need for repentance and sacrifice to pay our debts to God, who’s been so good to us, and now with the beginning of what’s called Passiontide, these two weeks we focus on this increasing conflict between Christ and the Jews. And you’ll notice that whenever He says anything from now on, it’s always something that will ensure His condemnation by the Jews. So, there’s this growing conflict, and we observe this period of Lent, this third period, which will last up until Holy Thursday.
Lent ends with the Mass of the Supper of our Lord. We have certain things that fall away from our sight. Christ disappeared from the midst of the Jews, when they wanted to kill Him, ’cause it wasn’t the right day yet. And so, we hide Christ. We have the crosses, crucifix, statuary, as covered. There are certain prayers we don’t say in Mass, like the Gloria, at certain parts of the Mass. We didn’t have Psalm 42 at the foot of the altar. We’re to be focused on the person of Christ. And when we veil the cross now, and we focus on this growing conflict and Christ ensuring that the Jews will kill Him, it makes the unveiling of the cross that much more important and dramatic for us on Good Friday.
But why all of this trajectory of this Liturgical Year with the different seasons? What’s it all about? What is going on? Where does it lead?
Well, we can start with the first question from the Baltimore Catechism. Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world in order to be happy with Him in the next. Now they’re basically citing something from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Treatise on Happiness in the Summa Theologica. Elsewhere, Thomas will say that to know God is to love Him. And Augustine says that God created man capax Dei. Capax Dei: capable of an intimate relationship with God. He basically made our nature to fit with Him. Now, ever since the fall, our nature isn’t in such a great state, and by nature we can’t attain salvation; we can’t worship God properly.
We need an infusion of super nature. It’s called grace. Now back to the Baltimore Catechism. If God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him, we can say, in a certain sense, that each one of those verbs, each one of those infinitives, is a corollary to the other. It’s like approaching God through a different angle, knowing Him, loving Him, serving Him. If to know Him is to love Him – if you were to see God, you couldn’t help but love Him, if you’re in a state of grace. And if you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments, says Our Lord. So, all the bases are covered. These are three approaches, so to say, to the one thing. Now it sounds easy, but there’s a problem here, and that’s al called alienation.
We have been alienated from God through original sin. And in order to prepare us for our redemption, God gave us certain… well, he gave the Jews certain practices that would help them to understand better what Christ was doing or would do. And so, we have this endless bloodstream of slaughtered animals.
And the blood would be mixed with water. The High Priest would say some prayers and sprinkle the people, and that would make them capable of worship, of Temple Worship. What would make you incapable to enter a temple? If you touched a cadaver. If you had leprosy. You were not allowed to participate in Temple Worship. These aren’t moral problems. They weren’t considered moral problems or transgressions. It just was something that had to do with death that didn’t belong in Paradise. And the Temple was to be a symbol of Paradise on Earth. And so, that’s why it was a sacred place.
Not everybody can go into the Temple, not everybody can go into the Holy of Holies; only the High Priest could for that year. And so, this sprinkling with the blood mixed with water, the act of the blood and the ashes of the burnt and slaughtered animals mixed with water, was a symbolic reconciliation to allow those who were unclean to participate in worship. But it didn’t touch the soul. It had nothing to do with forgiveness of sins. And those actions didn’t really restore man to friendship with God. They weren’t nothing, but they certainly weren’t the action of grace.
Paul tells us in Hebrews, and yes Paul wrote the Letter to the Hebrews, he says, For if the blood of goats and of oxen and the ashes of a heifer being sprinkled sanctified such as are defiled to the cleansing of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost offered himself without spot to God, cleanse our conscience from dead works? Now we’re getting into the particulars of what the reason is for all of this in the Liturgical Year. Christ is working out our salvation to cleanse our conscience from dead works, that’s sin, in order to what?: to serve the living God. He’s making us capable of participating in True Worship.
If you’ve read the Book of Revelations or the Apocalypse, whatever you wanna call it, and you look at what Heaven is like there, it’s an eternal liturgy. For worldly minds, for sensual people, for people who are tethered to their phones or to the life of the senses, that probably sounds boring to be in an eternal Mass. Yet for those who know, love, and serve God already in this life because they’re living the life of grace, it doesn’t get any better than that. This is what we were made for.
We can sometimes have a Muslim understanding of Heaven: It’s an ability to do all sorts of things that I couldn’t do here, like fly and eat infinite ice cream or whatever. The satisfaction of the senses is what the Qur’an promises. That’s not Heaven. Heaven is knowing, loving, and serving God in this life, and continuing it in an unlosable way in the next. So, it’s not something that is in the offing. It’s not something that comes later. Heaven starts now in our life of grace.
If touching the cadaver, or having leprosy, giving birth to a child, make you incapable of Temple Worship in Old Testament Judaism, sin makes us incapable of worship now. That’s why, if we’ve committed sin, we didn’t break a law; we broke a relationship. If we’ve committed sin, we have exercised a Blessed Trinity from our souls, we’ve cast Him out, we’ve betrayed Christ, we’ve turned our back on Him, so it doesn’t really make sense to receive Communion. And in fact, Paul tells us in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 10, about what it means to receive Communion in a state of sin. He says we swallow our own death.
When Christ enters into our soul, when the Blessed Trinity enters into our soul through the waters of Baptism, when He returns to us if we’ve sinned through Confession, we have this treasure called grace in our souls, and it’s the possession of the Blessed Trinity within us. It’s to have Heaven within us. It means we have a living, active relationship with the Almighty, something that we could never do for ourselves. He has to make it happen. And He chose His way to do that, and it’s through our system of sacraments. So, Christ isn’t making us legally capable of worship. He’s elevating our natures, substantially through grace, in order to bring us into His family, so that we can worship Him properly.
No one can do this of their own, not even the angels at the moment of their creation. They couldn’t enter into the Beatific Vision of their own accord. They were created in grace, but they needed that as an infusion, a supernatural act which God infused His life into the angels. But even that wasn’t enough; they needed actual grace in order to pass the test that was presented to each one of them. So, they weren’t Pelagians. They weren’t semi-Pelagians. They were saved, as Paul says, in the Christological Hymn of Colossians; they were saved, the angels were saved by the Blood of Christ. And so, the Blood of Christ shed on Golgotha, on the Cross, overarches time and space, and was applied to the angels at the moment of their creation. They had to cooperate with that grace. They received a helping grace in order to cooperate with that grace. As Augustine says, without your consent, God created you, but he won’t save you without your consent. And so, Christ’s bloody sacrifice makes this possible.
I remember somebody with a rosary in his hand telling me about his addiction to sin, and I said, “Are you in a state of grace now?” And he said, “No.” And I said, “Do you really think that rosary is pleasing to Our Lord? No prayer that you can offer to our Lord is meritorious or pleasing to Him.” And he said with great wonder, “Are you saying I should give up prayer?” And I said, “Well, uh, between the two, I would suggest you give up sin. I mean, you do have a choice here.”
The Jews understood the Messiah as a human figure who would come and remain with them. When the Messiah truly comes, they didn’t recognise Him. And they put Him to death, and that for them was the proof that He couldn’t have been the Messiah. And nonetheless, the Messiah far exceeded their expectations. In the Solemn High Mass, when you see the sub-deacon during the Roman canon with the veil over his eyes, he’s representing the Levitical priesthood, which came to an end with the priesthood of Jesus Christ. And that veil before the eyes of the sub-deacon represents the will… the blindness of the Jews, those who saw Him in the flesh, God in the flesh, and nonetheless rejected Him. They’re not the only ones who lose Christ and eternity; those who live the lives of the flesh, those who live the life of the world, those who live under the influence of Satan in an ordinary way. Well, they’ve closed the gates of Heaven themselves. It’s not that they’re not included. They’re invited, but they didn’t heed the invitation.
What a tremendous gift each one of us has received to have been baptized, to have been given the life of grace, the sacraments. We were created in God’s image and likeness, and were it not for the Blood of Christ, that would be forever frustrated. His Blood engenders this life of grace and begins eternity with Him in the here and now. We’ve been redeemed by the Blood of Christ and ought to live in consequence of that redemption through the three ordinary means of salvation: sacramental grace, prayer, and virtue. And then indeed the dead works have been cleansed from our conscience, and now we can truly serve Him.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
~Fr. Ermatinger